One of the occasions in which children first learn to pray is around the dinner table, saying grace. Often they learn a simple rote prayer, and one of the most common is, ‘God is great. God is good. Let us thank him for this food.’
God is great, and God is good.
It is a very simple statement but one with which people tend to make one of two errors:
First, we just do not believe it. Countless people over centuries have struggled with this. Is God really both great and good?
A few years back, at a pastors’ conference, I connected with an old ministry colleague of mine, whose fifteen-month-old son is going through another round of chemotherapy. If God is great, can he not intervene? If he is good, wouldn’t he want to? How about ISIS, or the war between Russia and Ukraine, or starvation in parts of Africa? The fact that these things happen in our lives, and in the world might convince us that God is either great or good, but not both.
The second error, and probably the more common one for Christians, is to just gloss over the truth that God is great and good. We affirm it quickly, but don’t slow down long enough to really consider the incredible truth of it. So we have a stunted experience of worship, a diminished understanding of God’s love for us, and only partial surrender of ourselves to God. As a result, we are not anywhere close to what Jesus called ‘fullness of life’.
Is God both great and good? Yes. But what does that mean for us?
That is what we are thinking about today, and we are going to be led in our thinking by the words of Psalm 8..
Psalm 8 is traditionally ascribed to King David of Israel, who lived about 1,000 BC. (The word ‘psalm’, by the way, simply means lyrical song, and the psalms were originally written to be sung, primarily in the context of public worship. So in our hymns and songs we are simply carrying on a millennia-old tradition of God’s people worshiping and praying by singing.) In this particular song God’s people reflect on God’s infinite greatness, and marvel that such a God is so caringly interested in humanity in general, and in humans individually.
The words with which David begins this song are familiar. We still sing them sometimes even today: O LORD our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory above the heavens. This is a declaration of the greatness of God.
God is infinitely great, and his glory transcends all other so-called ‘gods’, nations and beings. The LORD is to other gods what War & Peace is to Green Eggs and Ham, what ‘The Messiah’ is to ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’, what the Taj Mahal is to a leaky pup tent, what the sun is to a candle. God is just so much more than anything or anyone else that exists. He is, has always been, and will eternally be, Lord of history and the cosmos.
The Bible is full of images and statements about the greatness of God:
In several places, including Daniel 10 and Revelation 10, there are descriptions of angels, heavenly beings with faces like the sun, clothed in rainbows and clouds, voices like trumpets and thunder, whose very presence overwhelms and strikes fear into the hearts of all who see them. But even these overwhelmingly glorious angels are God’s worshippers and servants, at his beck and call, and they fall down before the throne of God and declare their humility. That is how great God is.
By the will and word of God the heavens and earth exist. He spoke stars, seas and mountains into existence, and created the almost infinitely complex atom. That is how great God is.
When he descended on Mount Sinai in Exodus 19 before the nation of Israel, he did so in fire, smoke, trumpet blast and thunder, and the whole mountain trembled. His glory so terrified the people that they dared not approach the mountain. The poetry of Psalm 97 says mountains melt like wax in his presence. In the book of Exodus God crushes the Egyptian pantheon of Gods with a series of plagues that devastate the country. Israel is freed from slavery. God proceeds to care for them by parting the sea so they can cross on dry land. He provides water in the desert, food for a million people, protection from attacking armies. God raises up nations – some of the greatest nations in history: Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome – and uses them for his own good purposes. That is how great God is, andnd this is the God we worship here today. So we come in humility and awe and even fear.
God is great.
Nor is he some supreme but impersonal force.
I read an interview with Paul McCartney, and in that interview he said he did not consider himself religious or believe in God, but rather in forces of good and evil. I have heard others talk about fate, or the universe itself as a force that governs things with a will. I am not sure how you can have will without personality. I am not sure how you define ‘good’ and ‘evil’ apart from personality. If there is a supreme force that governs the universe, we can be sure that it is a personal being.
The first line in the psalm is O LORD, our Lord…. You will notice in your Bible that the two words ‘LORD/Lord’ look different. One of them is written in all capital letters. That is the way our English Bibles translate the Hebrew name ‘Yahweh’, or sometimes ‘Jehovah’. ‘Yahweh’ is God’s personal name. In Exodus chapter 3, Moses has his famous encounter with God at the burning bush, and God says to Moses, ‘I am sending you to Egypt, and through you I will deliver my people Israel from slavery.’ And Moses, hesitant, says, ‘Well, when I talk to the elders of Israel, and say, ‘God sent me’, and they say, ‘What’s his name?’, what should I tell them?’ See, in Egypt, everyone was familiar with many gods: Re, Horus, Amon…. So to come and say ‘God’ isn’t enough. What if they ask ‘Which god?’
And God’s answer to Moses is, ‘Tell them, Yahweh sent me’ ‘. ‘Yahweh’ means ‘I am’. It represents God’s eternal being, that he is self-existent, depends on nothing for his existence and therefore can never not-exist. And so God reveals himself as a God with a name, ‘I AM’ or ‘Yahweh’.
So when you see ‘LORD’ written in all capital letters, that is God’s name, ‘Yahweh’.
Then you also have ‘Lord’ with only a capital ‘L’, which is a translation of the Hebrew word ‘Adonai’, which means sovereign, master, or one in authority.
So ‘O LORD, our Lord’, means ‘O Yahweh, our sovereign Lord’. It pairs the ideas of God’s sovereignty (ie. that he reigns over all) and his personality. Not only is there a God who is supreme and over all, but we know his name, we can call him by name. Just as I could say ‘Mary is my wife’ or you could say ‘John is our pastor’, we can say ‘Yahweh is our Lord’. The Lord is a personal God. Not just distant and aloof, he has made himself known. He has, as it were, introduced himself to us.
God is infinitely great, and he is personal.
And he is good.
Verse 3 begins, ‘When I consider your heavens’. Let’s consider the heavens for a moment. We know now that the Psalmist had a very limited view of the heavens, but he took the greatest or highest thing and calls them ‘the LORD’s’. The fact that we know so much more about the heavens does not change the psalmist’s words. In fact, it multiplies the meaning a millions or billions of time: When I consider your heavens… What is man that you you are mindful of him? Indeed.
Here we are, humans, micro-nothings clinging to a speck of cosmic dust on the outer fringes of one of 10 billion galaxies.
Do you feel insignificant? Nevertheless, in the vastness of this universe, the God who holds it in his hand and by whose power things continue to function, is particularly interested in one aspect of this creation.
Oh, if only we knew how God loves us! He is so interested not just in humanity as a race, but in each one of us as people. He knows our names. He knows the myriad of moments that make up our lives. He knows the events, emotions, crises, and joys, and yet he pays close attention to us!
Some of you are wondering about your jobs and future. Others are concerned for your kids. Others have health issues, employment issues, relational issues. Others are content and at peace. Whatever your situation, the great God of heaven and earth is near, so near that if he were a physical being you could hear his quiet breathing. ‘Closer than the air around me’ the song says.
Who are we, that God would be so attentive to us? Well, we are his beloved creation, created for relationship with him. The Bible uses three relationships to describe what God wants our relationship with him to be like: friendship, parent/child, and marriage. Our relationship with God is like all of those at their most intimate and best.
In the creation accounts in the book of Genesis, we read that humanity was created in God’s image. We’re a special creation, and given a unique place in creation: the place of lordship. God created man to rule over creation, not to exploit, but to steward it. God gave us glory and honor, and we can rightly consider ourselves the ‘pinnacle of creation’. Man having dominion over the earth. God entrusting to us what he has made.
Of course, as we look around, we do not see this as our reality, do we? Things are not as they should be. Ever since Adam and Eve’s rejection of God in Eden, all creation has suffered. Not only human character and sin, like gossip, hatred, war, crime, abuse and the like, but also things like cancer, famine, and destruction. The world is different because of sin. With our fall, everything for which we are responsible also was affected. Romans 8 says that all creation is groaning and longing for the redemption of mankind. Things are not right
So what did God do? He sent his own Son, Jesus Christ, from heaven to earth, to deal with the problem of sin. He became one of us, born as a human baby, living the human experience, in order that as our representative he could die for our sin. The difference is, of course, that Jesus did not sin. He uniformly did, spoke and thought what was right. He is the perfect man, the man. The story of the Bible is that in Jesus, God is working this redemption. The life of Jesus, from his birth at Christmas, through his death and resurrection to his ascension, is the defining point in history, the point at which there was a cosmic shift toward wholeness again. Jesus died for our sin, earning for us forgiveness and restored relationship with God. By his resurrection, he conquered death, and guaranteed that God’s work of redemption would be brought to completion.
That is why Hebrews says That we do see Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.
Yet at present we do not see everything subject to them. But we will. In Jesus, humans are reconciled to relationship with God, and ultimately, at the end of the day, given dominion over a new heaven and earth.
So the elevated position of man, that the psalm writer talks about, is realized in Christ, and because of Christ, it becomes our reality.
What are we, that God is mindful of us? Let me tell you how much God is mindful of you, how much he is interested in you, and caring about your redemption.
The Bible says that the definitive demonstration of God’s love is the death of his own Son:
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life….
God demonstrates his own love in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us….
Christ loved us and gave himself up for us….
This is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his son to be an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
In these and many other verses, the Bible draws a straight line from the love of God for us to the death of Jesus for us.
At the beginning of this sermon we discovered that people fall into two errors about the twin truths that God is great and God is good. One is that we tend to not believe it. If God was good he would want to fix things, redeem things. If God were great, he’d be able to do it. The God of the Bible cares deeply about you, and about this world. He desperately wants to redeem things. He, too, knows that sickness and death, war and famine, loneliness and grief, are not how things should be. And he can and is doing something about it. The world is in process of redemption, and he has guaranteed a future where there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain. The God that people long for is the God who is there.
The other error is that we don’t really think about God’s greatness and his goodness. We don’t think about it long enough to let it make a difference in our lives, and that’s what I want to challenge you to do this morning.
If God is great, then it is appropriate to submit to his Lordship. God has told us what is right and wrong. He has told us how to live fully. Hence his commands to have honesty, self-sacrifice, generosity, love, humility, sexual purity, integrity of character and so on. He is Lord of heaven and earth. He is king of all, supremely and eternally, and he created you. So it makes sense to recognize that Yahweh’s Lordship and to obey him, to order your life accordingly.
If God is good, then we are secure in our relationship to him. He will only ever ask of us what is best for us. So his commands are not to deprive us in our life, but to do good in our life. To walk in God’s ways are not a sacrifice, but the road to blessing.
Like a parent who says to their child to ‘do your homework’ or ‘check before crossing the street’ or to ‘have respect for the authority of their teachers’ (or themselves). You are not, as parents, setting them up for a life that is less fulfilling, but more fulfilling. To walk in God’s ways is like that, except that usually they give an instant payoff: satisfaction in taking the high road, benefits of wisdom in your decisions, avoiding the consequences of a lack of wisdom.
God is great. God is good.
You are secure in ‘God is strong’. You worship a God who is loving.
God is big enough to hold the universe in his hands and he is small enough to know and care for every detail of your life.
To put ourselves in his hands is both right and good.
Do you want a life that is best? full? (Perhaps difficult. God never said he’d make life easy. It’s hard to learn. It’s hard to get into shape.) But do you want a life that is ultimately satisfying?
There’s only one answer: Come to a God who is great and good.
Amen.